Opportunistic Network Coding for Real-Time Transmission over Wireless Networks

Network coding has shown a good potential for improving network throughput and, recently, has been used in multimedia transmission over wireless networks. In addition to guaranteed throughput, real-time multimedia transmission requires bounded delay, delay variation, and packet loss. This paper presents RTOC, a new XOR-based opportunistic network coding architecture for real-time data transmission. RTOC is an application-independent architecture that takes into consideration the characteristics of real-time traffic and provides an efficient framework to optimize multimedia application requirements such as bandwidth, delay, delay variation, and loss. The performance of RTOC was evaluated using simulated video streaming traffic. The results demonstrated that RTOC can improve the real-time performance metrics such as the packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, jitter, and throughput by considerable margins.